Everyone Wants to Be Your Second Brain

Ok right off the bat lets define PKM because you might not know what it means. It stands for Personal Knowledge Management, and it defines the category of apps that help you create your own robust knowledge graph and 'combine and remix' different bits of knowledge and analysis to create whole new things. Its a burgeoning category with a lot of hardcore believers (in fact many of them have 'believer' plans) and many great apps like Roam Research (one of the OGs), Obsidian, Reflect Notes, and many others.

I also got on the believer plan of a different type of app about a year ago. Its called Voicenotes and is one of the cleanest implementations of AI-enhanced transcription into a knowledge graph.

Basically, you open the app, hit record and start talking. When you're done you hit stop and the app immediately starts transcribing your audio in the cloud and after a few seconds it shows up in your app. The transcription quality is very good but that's just the basics. Once you have your transcription, you can do things with it. Push a button and select from a variety of options like 'summarize', list out the main points, or even create a blog post or something bite size for a specific social media site. You can do similar things with multiple entries. Its very cool and useful and I've found it to be the quickest way to get some thoughts down that are easy to find later.

Convergence

So I just saw that Voicenotes rolled out the ability to write down notes. Makes sense. Sometimes, you just want to write something down. What is interesting about this move is it starts to plot a course more directly into the personal knowledge management (PKM) space. Now you're writing down content, and maybe you want to start formatting it and creating more detailed notes, and linking notes together manually (which voicenotes already does automatically).

I think it will be intriguing to see what choices they make as the app matures and inevitably starts to overlap more with functionality traditionally found in the PKM space.

One of the endpoints of PKM is audio. While apps like Reflect or Obsidian have integrated audio inputs and AI-enhanced audio as add-ons, Voice Notes started with that natively.

I don't know if they'll ever fully develop a complete personal knowledge management system. There's a lot to it and it might dilute their value prop while creating something overly complex to use. I'd love to be a fly on their internal whiteboard and see if they are doubling down on what made the product intriguing in the first place (seamless use of audio and AI to create knowledge) or expanding into more use cases to capture users. I'm sure they'd say both. The devil is in the details eh?

Anyway, its a great app. Check it out at voicenotes.com.